Editor's Corner

After what seems like a year full of AI frenzy, it doesn’t surprise me that most dictionaries’ words of the year were about technology. As promised the other day, here are the words of the year from the Collins English Dictionary (vibe coding) and the Oxford Dictionary (rage bait).

The Collins Dictionary blog describes vibe coding like this:

Tired of wrestling with syntax? Just go with the vibes. That’s the essence of vibe coding, Collins’ Word of the Year 2025, a term that captures something fundamental about our evolving relationship with technology. Coined by AI pioneer Andrej Karpathy, vibe coding refers to the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to write computer code. Basically, telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself. It’s programming by vibes, not variables. While tech experts debate whether it’s revolutionary or reckless, the term has resonated far beyond Silicon Valley, speaking to a broader cultural shift towards AI-assisted everything in everyday life.

The man who coined the term describes it a little more casually (from Tech.Co):

It’s not really coding – I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works. – Andrej Karpathy

The Oxford Dictionary chose rage bait as its word of the year.

Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content”.

With 2025’s news cycle dominated by social unrest, debates about the regulation of online content, and concerns over digital wellbeing, our experts noticed that the use of rage bait this year has evolved to signal a deeper shift in how we talk about attention—both how it is given and how it is sought after—engagement, and ethics online.

…(I)t has become shorthand for content designed to elicit anger by being frustrating, offensive, or deliberately divisive in nature, and a mainstream term referenced in newsrooms across the world and discourse amongst content creators. It’s also a proven tactic to drive engagement, commonly seen in performative politics. As social media algorithms began to reward more provocative content, this has developed into practices such as rage-farming, which is a more consistently applied attempt to manipulate reactions and to build anger and engagement over time by seeding content with rage bait, particularly in the form of deliberate misinformation of conspiracy theory-based material.

Isn’t rage bait two words?

The Oxford Word of the Year can be a singular word or expression, which our lexicographers think of as a single unit of meaning.

Rage bait is a compound of the words rage, meaning ‘a violent outburst of anger’, and bait, ‘an attractive morsel of food’. Both terms are well-established in English and date back to Middle English times. Although a close parallel to the etymologically related clickbait—which has a shared objective of encouraging online engagement and the potential to elicit annoyance—rage bait has a more specific focus on evoking anger, discord, and polarization.

The article continues on the website (Oxford Dictionary) and raises some interesting points about “being human in a tech-driven world.” I recommend having a look at the whole article. It’s a little scary.

Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory | Knowledge Enablement

Pronouns: she/her | Call via Teams | jackhenry.com

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